Marie Cisco

Marie Cisco is a writer, director, and solo-performer. Her work explores ideas surrounding feminist expression and the use of archetypes as sources of power and independence. She has written several solo shows including, “Invisible Crowns” and “22nd Century”. Her recent directing credits include, “Blackademics” by Idris Goodwin and “Reality Check” by Kevin Douglas. She is also the founder of Invisible Crown Productions. Marie holds a BFA in Theatre Arts from The Theatre School at DePaul University and a M.A in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago.

Ari Fulton

Ari Fulton

Ari Fulton is a New York based costume designer for stage, film, opera and dance. She has trained at DePaul University, receiving a BFA in Costume Design. Ms. Fulton followed her undergraduate studies, by receiving a MFA in Design for Stage and Film, from New York University’s, Tisch School of the Arts. Ms. Fulton has designed in Paris, Ireland, and Ghana. Recently, she has finished working on the Showtime series, Nurse Jackie and Orange is the New Black. Ms. Fulton is most interested in captivating the imagination, by creating iconic characters that stick with the viewer, long after the performance has ended.

Ari Fulton

Ari Fulton

Ari Fulton is a New York based costume designer for stage, film, opera and dance. She has trained at DePaul University, receiving a BFA in Costume Design. Ms. Fulton followed her undergraduate studies, by receiving a MFA in Design for Stage and Film, from New York University’s, Tisch School of the Arts. Ms. Fulton has designed in Paris, Ireland, and Ghana. Recently, she has finished working on the Showtime series, Nurse Jackie and Orange is the New Black. Ms. Fulton is most interested in captivating the imagination, by creating iconic characters that stick with the viewer, long after the performance has ended.

Nokukhanya Langa

Nokukhanya Langa

Born in 1991, Nokukhanya Langa is a South African/American painter.

She received her B.A. in Studio Art from Moravian College in 2013 and is currently based and working in Raigarh, India.

Gentry Isaiah George

Also a former Dance Artist for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ailey II, Lustig Dance Theatre, Collage Dance Collective, and Malcolm Low’s Formal Structure, George graduated from the Juilliard School in 2012. Gentry is an Associate Artist at New York Live Arts, and currently teaches Ballet and Dance Lab / Composition at USDAN Summer Camp for the Arts.

http://www.zestcollective.org/artistic-director

Vuyo Sotashe

Vuyo Sotashe

Young South African jazz vocalist, Vuyo(Vuyolwethu) Sotashe, is gradually making his mark in the New York jazz scene. Sotashe moved to the NYC in 2013 after being awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to pursue Master of Music (Spring 2015) at William Paterson University. Since then, he has gone to win first prize at the very first Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival Vocal Competition in 2014, and performed on the festival's main stage in February of 2015. More recently, he won the Audience prize award and placed second over-all at the Shure Montreux Jazz Voice Competition in 2015, held at the annual Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. In the same he placed third in the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Vocal competition, where he was the very first male vocalist ever to place in the competition's finals.

Joanna Evans

Joanna is a theatre maker, performer and playwright from Cape Town, specializing in devised and physical theatre. She has created a number of original productions, including ‘The Year of the Bicycle’, ‘King Kong What What’ and ‘Four Small Gods’. She also started up South Africa’s first theatre for early years company, which creates performance for children under four. Her plays have toured nationally as well as to festivals in Italy, Germany, Iran and Réunion, and she has been a performer in residence for the African Talent Network in Cameroon. 'The Year of the Bicycle' was published by Junkets Press in 2016. Joanna is particularly interested in intergenerational performance, non-human animals in performance, animacy, intersectional feminism, and post-colonial and queer theory.

Liona Nyariri

Liona Nyariri is a Zimbabwean born visual artist. She completed her BA Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2013. She is currently completing an MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School in New York. At the core of her practice is a deep interest into notions of history, construction, and narrative. Through her formal investigations of materiality, she is interested in the becoming of objects that carry certain weight or baggage/histories. Through the abstraction of these objects, how do they begin to perform as things onto which ideas are projected onto – how do they create meaning and how do they implicate the viewer? These are the questions that she contemplates and is interested in investigating.

Previously creating performative photographic works that challenged stereotypes, Nyariri explored the origin, influence and validity of these constructions as passed down through history (both social and personal, oral and written). Exploring the past to establish an understanding, she reclaimed a personal authority by virtue of her apparent dismissal of imposed limitations. More recently the artist has shifted focus toward the future, allowing fantasy to dominate her creative pursuits

Wangechi Mutu

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, educated in Britain and America and resident in New York since the mid-nineties, Wangechi Mutu's work has often seemed to bear the gaze of a perpetual outsider, simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the discovery of another fresh outrage in the lands in which she travels. Much of Mutu's work to date has been concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially black women, in the contemporary world. Her paintings and collages often feature writhing female forms, their skin an eruption of buboes, mutant appendices like gun shafts or machine gears sprouting from the sockets of joints, their bodies half human, half hyena. They offer a glimpse at the perversions of the body and the mind wrought by forces active in the oppression of women. Mutu commonly works on paper or Mylar polyester film. Manipulating ink and acrylic paint into pools of colour she carefully applies to her surfaces imagery sampled from disparate sources- Vogue, National Geographic, hunting, motorbike and porn magazines. The resulting works are a rebuke to the conventions of aesthetics and ethnography and eroticism that underpin such publications, offering instead an existence that is riotously free of biological determinism or psychological conditioning.

Staceyann Chin

Jay Pather

Jay Pather is Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town, Director of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts and Artistic Director of Siwela Sonke. A Fulbright Scholar, he read for an MA in Dance Theatre at New York University and since then Pather’s work has traveled widely extending across discipline, site and culture. He has collaborated with visual artists, architects and urban planners, since 1984, taking his inter-cultural performances into public spaces and working with the architecture of Johannesburg, Durban, London, Zanzibar, Amsterdam, New York, Barcelona, Mumbai, Muscat, New Delhi, Copenhagen and Cape Town.

Pather has presented papers at amongst others the African Knowledges Workshop, the School for New Dance in Amsterdam, the International Leadership Forum at Aix en Provence, the UNESCO Conference on Art Education in Africa, at the Territoires de la creation Conference in Lille, the Metropolis Conference in Copenhagen, the World Cultural Forum in Brazil, the African Urbanism Colloquium in Cairo and at the International Theatre Institute in London.

Pather has served on the National ACTAG, the Arts and Culture Trust of the President, the Advisory and State Theatre Board and the delegation investigating cultural exchange with Cuba. In 2006, he was appointed onto the National Arts Festival Committee and elected as Chairperson for the Performing Arts Network of South Africa. In 2007 Pather was appointed co-curator for both the Spier Contemporary Exhibition and the Infecting the City Festival.

Awards include a Heritage Award, a Brett Kebble Award, the Tunkie Award for Leadership in Dance and a UKZN Convocation Award for leadership in the Arts and Humanities. Following his CityScapes series, he was commissioned to present Body of Evidence at the FNB Dance Umbrella and the National Arts Festival. In 2009 his site specific Blind Spot was commissioned by the Metropolis Biennale. He is currently developing Qaphela Caesar a work that was installed in 14 rooms in the Cape Town City Hall, for Dance Umbrella 2012 at the old Stock Exchange in downtown Johannesburg . Pather has most recently been appointed Chairman of the National Arts Festival Artistic Committee to succeed Sibongile Khumalo and curator for the Infecting the City Public Art Festival for 2012-2014.